Welcome to the February edition of the Fedora Newsletter. As we roll into the second month of the year, we have been working hard to deliver updates to the software and bring the community together for our Fedora Open House. Please keep reading for all of the news we’d like to share with you this month. 

News 

Fedora Open House 

Reminder that the Fedora Open House is on February 16th at 10am Eastern! To get your calendar invite and zoom link, send an email to arran.griffith@lyrasis.org. 

This is shaping up to be a great crowd, so don’t miss your opportunity to join us. Members of the Tech Team will be on hand to demo the core software and showcase the Camel Toolbox 6.0.0. Along with our demos, we will also be reserving time to open the (virtual) floor to answer any of your questions!  

Details: 

  • Wednesday, Feb 16, 2022 @10am Eastern 
  • FREE to attend! If you’ve already received your calendar invite and know others who are interested, please feel free to share your zoom link with them. 

Technology Update 

Over the last month, we have focused on maintenance of the Fedora core with bugfixes and completion of lower priority but nevertheless important improvements. In January we convened a meeting to discuss a fixity service for Fedora based on the results of the Technology Survey we sent out before Christmas. Mark Jordan from Simon Frasier University presented his tool, Riprap, and Joshua Westgard from the University of Maryland also spoke about another service they use.  We reviewed the current state of Camel Toolbox’s fixity service. We then evaluated the set of desired features and to what extent they are supported by the three solutions, and it became clear that Riprap supports nearly all the features that identified. The other projects (UMD’s and Camel Toolbox) adequately address their individual use cases. So our recommendation is that those interested in a fixity service use the following feature matrix to decide how to proceed based on your specific needs. Please feel free to reach out to myself, daniel.bernstein@lyrasis.org, or send us a message in Slack if you are interested in more details. 

Additionally, we have broken ground on building-in some basic statistics to the Fedora core both in the API as well as the HTML UI. These will include counts of resources and bytes by RDF Type, Mime-Type, and creation dates. If you have specific statistics that you would like to see exposed via the API, please don’t hesitate to create a ticket in JIRA with your feature request. 

LYRASIS Catalyst Idea Survey 

In 2021, The Ohio State University submitted a LYRASIS Catalyst Fund Idea proposal to investigate migration services as an alternate revenue source for the Fedora Program. At the end of January, the team at LYRASIS sent out a survey to several Fedora mailing lists as part of the research surrounding this topic. The goal of this survey is to understand how to improve communication channels when new versions of Fedora are released, as well as to explore the appeal of various migration services. The results of this survey will be used to provide recommendations for strategic planning within the Fedora community but may also prove applicable to other OSS programs. 

The survey should take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete, and we ask that only one person per institution respond to the survey. As an added incentive, all participants in this survey will be eligible to win one of two $50.00 Visa gift cards. For those interested in entering the raffle, there will be an optional question where you may enter your name and email. Regardless of entry, all survey responses will remain anonymous.  

Survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6PHGGQD 

The survey will be open until February 28th, 2022. 

IMLS Grant Update: Fedora Migration Paths and Tools 

We are excited to announce that the final pieces of the IMLS Grant (lg-246264-ols-20) are winding down. With Whitman College nearing cut-over to their new production site and their portion of the grant work completed, we are moving into the next phase of the Grant process. 
 

During this phase we will be doing the following: 

  • Compiling the migration documentation and lessons learned from each partner institution and preparing it to be shared with the community. We will be seeking institutions with existing Fedora 3.x repositories to test the tools and documentation and provide feedback. While this toolkit is aimed at those running Fedora 3.x, anyone is encouraged to go through the material and provide any feedback they have. 
  • As you may have seen, we issued a Migration Workshop survey to gauge interest in attending an in-person event in early spring. If you have not done so, please take a moment to fill out the survey so that we can begin to plan accordingly. 

SURVEY HERE: https://forms.gle/snDaNQSEiTuu3gri7 - this survey will only remain open until February 18, 2022. 

If your institution is interested in the possibility of hosting this training workshop (should we be able to host in-person events), please contact Arran Griffith (arran.griffith@lyrasis.org) for more information. 

Fedora Registry 

Part of our mission with Fedora 6.0 is to better understand our user install base. As a result, we are reaching out to the community now to help with these efforts. Is your institution in our registry? If so, are all the details up to date? Check out the current Fedora Registry here: https://duraspace.org/fedora/community/fedora-users/ 

Need an update or need to add your instance? Use this link: https://duraspace.org/registry/register-your-site/ 

By understanding our install base and what versions of Fedora are being used, we will be better prepared to provide the support necessary for our entire community.

Membership - Your support is valuable! 

Fedora is an open-source, community-supported program funded entirely by membership contributions. This funding supports staff to work on developing, teaching, engaging and supporting Fedora users across the globe. Without our members, we would not be able to support the preservation of the vital content contained within the repositories of our users. Find out how you can help. Learn more and become a member today! 

Get Involved 

Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. Join the conversation on our Fedora Slack channel or sign up for our Fedora community mailing list to stay in the loop. You can find more details here. 

 
 

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